- Fulfill a 1:8 ratio of adults to children
- Visit with families frequently to discuss their children’s develop-
ment with them.
IEA Pre-Primary Study
The results of this large, multinational, longitudinal study, which was
sponsored by the International Association for the Evaluation of Edu-
cational Achievement (IEA), complement the High/Scope findings and
are especially relevant to developing countries. The study included
more than 5,000 children ages 4–7 years who were followed in nearly
2,000 settings across 15 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North
America (Montie, Xiang, and Schweinhart 2006). The purpose was to
identify how characteristics of pre-primary settings in various commu-
nities affect children’s language and intellectual development at age 7.
In the study, four characteristics of preschool programs that pre-
dicted children’s abilities later were:
- Having free choice in participatory learning activities
- Engaging in few whole-group activities
- Having many, varied materials available
- Having teachers with higher general levels of schooling.
Any limitations in the applicability of U.S. studies of ECD pro-
grams to developing countries are not shared by the IEA Pre-primary
Project. This project shows what works in a great variety of countries.
➣A summary of the IEA Pre-Primary Study is available at <http://www.iea.
nl/ppp.html> or <http://www.highscope.org/Research/international/
iea_preprimary.htm>.- Evaluations Must Be Well-designed and Include Program-sensitive
Outcome Measures
ECD programs cannot be known to be successful unless they receive
good evaluations. An effective evaluation assesses three components
of ECD programs:
98 Lawrence J. Schweinhart